The movie based on Michael Lewis' best-selling book "The Big Short" will be coming out in December.
The official trailer was recently released, and we can hardly wait to see some of Hollywood's biggest names playing the heroes of the financial crisis— Steve Carell as Steve Eisman, Christian Bale as Michael Burry, Ryan Gosling as Greg Lippmann, and Brad Pitt as Ben Hockett.
Like the book, the film chronicles the stories of this group of Wall Street outsiders who accurately predicted the housing crisis and made a fortune betting against subprime-mortgage bonds.
If you haven't read it yet, we recommend that you do. It's full of incredible details. One in particular that stands out is a passage on the observations of former FrontPoint head trader Danny Moses.
Moses, described as the small-picture guy on Steve Eisman's team, claimed he could tell a lot about a guy just by looking at him.
The best place to study Wall Street people was on the morning commute from Connecticut. Moses estimated that 95% of the people on his morning Metro North train worked on Wall Street.
Just by looking at them, he said, he could tell at a glance what their jobs were and where they worked.
[The following text is excerpted from The Big Short.]
If they were on their BlackBerrys, they were probably hedge fund guys, checking their profits and losses in the Asian markets. [Given the book was based on 2008, you can probably swap BlackBerrys then for iPhones today.]
This is an excerpt from Michael Lewis' The Big Short (pp. 235-237).
If they slept on the train they were probably sell-side people — brokers, who had no skin in the game.
This is an excerpt from Michael Lewis' The Big Short (pp. 235-237).
Anyone carrying a briefcase or a bag was probably not employed on the sell side, as the only reason you'd carry a bag was to haul around brokerage research, and the brokers didn't read their own reports — at least not in their spare time.
This is an excerpt from Michael Lewis' The Big Short (pp. 235-237).
See the rest of the story at Business Insider